An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with Technische Universität Berlin

In both art and science, only the results of the creative process are visible. What happens behind closed doors in labs and studios remains as invisible as it is mysterious. The Berlin-based artist and professor of visual arts Stefanie Bürkle (*1966) has taken on these sites of creation by photographing with analog large-format cameras laboratories and art studios throughout Berlin.

Bürkle's photographies are space portraits that feature deserted spaces for development and thought, rooms full of materials, tools, experiments, and setups whose purposes remain hidden from the viewer but that nevertheless allow us to imagine great things. The photograph reveals links, interfaces, and parallels between the spatial constitution of laboratories and studios through which the close connection between the two sites of activity – as places for the creation of research and art – become palpable.

Stefanie Bürkle’s photographs are, in a certain way, about the alchemists’ labs of the present time. She explores the analogies between experimentation and process in both the studio and the laboratory, and reveals these workshops of knowledge for the first time.